Let It Never Be Finished
by UrbanHymnal
Summary: Everywhere: He builds and builds and builds. A Post Reichenbach character study.


**Disclaimer:** All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. I am in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of _Sherlock_. No copyright infringement is intended.

* * *

**Author's Note:** This is my first go at a _Sherlock_ story, so hopefully it appeals to those that enjoy the show. If you have a moment, please review. Thanks to all that take the time to read this little character study.

* * *

In a drenched alleyway in Cleveland, huddled in between rain soaked garbage, he builds a sunroom. Massive holes in the wall (no windows) are filled with golden light that trickles in, catching motes of dust in its path. He fills the room with medical journals, newspaper clippings, and the sound of John's laughter. It pings and radiates across hard wood floors, mapping out each corner like sonar, like a beacon. It sounds like: _Brilliant. Fantastic. Wonderful._

The mugs of tea (so strong a spoon could dissolve in it) and discarded jumpers come later, additions that he doesn't recall placing, but are there nonetheless.

* * *

In Dublin, chest jerking in staccato stops and side twisting in pain, he plots out a sitting room. He decorates it with tea pots, fluffed filled cushions, platters of biscuits, and the constant buzz of sap-filled, mediocre, ridiculous telly in the background.

As he leans against a cold brick wall, willing his lungs to pull in air, he is also wiping his feet on the mat next to the entrance of the room, breathing in the smell of menthol and perfume. He lets his eyes wander over exposed drywall, beams, and wires dangling where light fixtures should be. He knows how all of it will look, should he ever bother to finish it.

He doesn't. He moves on.

_Oh, Sherlock, look at the mess you've made._

* * *

While strangling the life out of a man in Caracas, he constructs an office with two walls and a floor. Police tape strings out across the empty space where the remaining two walls should be. Past them, he can hear the rush of footsteps, the slamming of car doors, and the click of handcuffs. The desk, cheap, is covered in strewn papers, all marked with the ring of long forgotten cups of coffee. A hideous orange blanket is sagging over an uncomfortable chair. A trash can, overflowing with needles and small plastic bags, stands at attention in one corner.

Huddling in a darkened doorway, the night air punctured by sirens, he fumbles with a lighter and a cigarette, fingers shaking. He drags in a lungful of acrid smoke, closes his eyes, and adds a rumpled suit coat, left behind from too many nights working into dawn, draped over a half-open filing cabinet.

He mutters into the night air, "I don't even smoke."

_Neither do I. So let's work together._

* * *

In a dingy hostel in Moscow, hands sticking with blood and sweat, he builds a staircase to nowhere. It leads up and up and up into nothingness. As he slowly, shakily, stitches his skin back together, he hides the smells of sweat and vomit in the dark corners, tucks the sound of John's gasp upon waking from a nightmare back in the far reaches of a pitch black landing. Under the floorboards, he shoves the wrinkles around John's eyes and mouth when he is disappointed and buries the sound of his shout. _Just so I know, do you care about that at all?_

A garish pair of reindeer antlers hang off the banister, last seen hanging off the skull decorating their wall on Christmas day. Here now, but no matter. He leaves them there rather than discard them. They'll serve as a marker, a testament to failure.

* * *

When Mycroft finally catches up to him in Berlin, he notes his brother's thin lips pressed together and the way his suit sits too big across his waist and chest (worry? Unlikely). He grudgingly builds a closet down one long abandoned hallway and shoves umbrellas, waistcoats, sweets, delicate fine china, chemistry sets, _The Prince, _and one lone pirate hat into the cramped space. _Dear brother. . ._

He doesn't bother with shelves or a door, just crams everything that is his brother into as small as a place as possible. The entire mess bulges past the doorframe, threatening to spill over, like Mycroft's waist at age fifteen.

"When will it be finished, Sherlock?"

He doesn't ask what his brother means. The answer is the same: "When they are safe."

* * *

He wanders the corridors of his mind palace, past half-finished rooms and glassless windows, skirts around doors that lead to brick walls and stairs leading into the ceiling, brushes up against curtains, the color of dark bruises on fragile skin, that hang along windows that look into other rooms.

Tokyo: He creates a room with just a refrigerator and fills it with milk jugs.

Madrid: A room painted to match John's increasingly numbered jumpers that he finds shoved into every crevice, nook, and cranny. Black and white and oatmeal and blue with red and white. The entire room smells of cheap shaving gel, spicy cologne, gunpowder, and home.

London: So close. He sits in Molly's flat and drifts in between fevered dreams. She'll never know he was here; he just needs to stop for a moment. Shivering on her couch, he franticly builds the skeleton of an entirely new wing. Cats, mewling and howling, fleeing from the sounds of gunshots and laughter, dart in between the half-finished rooms filled with body bags.

Everywhere: He builds and builds and builds.

* * *

It spans over mental acres— leaning towers, dry moats, empty gardens—on and on and on. He feels the way each brick drags down at his shoulders, the weight both burden and blessing. He lacks the ability to stop constructing room after room; the constant sound of building buzzing, pushing, against his ears: the slap of paint on walls, the clip and slide of metal as John cleans his gun, the grind of mortar and stone, Mrs. Hudson's tut as she wipes down the mantel, the thudding pound of hammers, Lestrade's exasperated sigh. All there pushing, pulling, drowning out everything.

It isn't until he feels the dig of John's fingers in his arm, painful but welcome, and hears the choked shout of "Jesus Christ, Sherlock" (actually _here_, not bouncing around in a half-imagined room or shouting from a darkened never-ending staircase), that it all suddenly falls silent.

And all he is left with is the quiet groan of everything slowly settling.


End file.
